Page:Three introductory lectures on the study of ecclesiastical history.djvu/51

history, we are apt to blend together the different persons of the story under one common class. Yet here, even more than in common history, we ought to keep each separate from each, if we would learn the lessons they have to teach to the world. Of ordinary readers, how few there are to whom the Fathers, the Schoolmen, nay, even the Reformers, although divided as classes, are not confounded as individuals! How few there are who can trace the descent, step by step, as the genealogy (so to speak) of the Church is unrolled before us. From Ignatius to Cyprian, from Origen to Athanasius, from Athanasius to Augustine, from Augustine to Bernard, from Bernard to Aquinas, to Tauler, to Luther, how wide are the gaps, how necessary the connexion, how startling the difference! Or, again, in the more outward history, how various are the trains of association awakened by the successive representatives of the Empire and of the Papacy, in Constantine, in Clovis, in Charlemagne, in Barbarossa, in Charles V.; or, on the other hand, in Gregory I., in Gregory VII., in Innocent III., in Leo X., in Sixtus V.! Each has his own message to deliver; each has his own work to perform; each is a link in that manifold chain which conveys the electric spark from the first to the nineteenth century. It was a happy thought of Eusebius, that he would trace the history of the various ancient Churches through the succession of Bishops, who in those early times were lite-